Further to my posting about the treatment received by a child at St Thomas's last week, I have received the following information which allegedly was told my informant by someone senior within the hospital:
...a large team from McKinsey’s has been working inside the trust for months, and will be there for another 6 months. The McKinsey consultants are being paid £1,000 per day. They have been given special powers to make any change, no matter how sweeping, to "make the numbers look right". They have drawn up a list of core services that the trust will offer in the future – everything else is to be hived off to surrounding hospitals. There are some very major changes happening, and a vast amount of money being spent – they have been given a large ‘special budget’ to do so. It is happening under direct control from just across the river.
I have contacted the press office of the hospital to get a response. I got no immediate response whatever to any of the allegations. The press officer said she would get back to me. I would be grateful if anyone with knowledge of the situation could contact me.
Of course, it is no crime to hire McKinsey. Reviewing what the hospital offers and what it does is perfectly reasonable, too. But is it true that services at Thomas's are going to be reduced? Is the bad experience of a child last week in any way indicative of general poor performance? I am content that people should remain anonymous. I can be reached by the email contact fairly low down in the column on the left.
Looking at the hospital trust's smart website, I see that some property re-development is under way. I wonder if that is any part of what is going on. New accommodation is being built for some of the tenants of the charity. What, I wonder, is happening to the old accomodation?
Looking for stories on St Thomas's on the BBC Online website, I came across this appalling story reported earlier this month. Of course, all hospitals make mistakes. But just think how this incident would have been plastered over the front pages if St Thomas's had been a private hospital.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS
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With last minute appointments, if you can't make it, this is not a waiting list failure.
Posted by: Paul at July 6, 2005 11:07 AM
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I receive treatment for cancer at St Thomas's Hospital and would have to say that I'm less than impressed. I don't have any horror stories to tell - my experience has just been of incompetence and a general lack of care towards patients - low level problems which have a cumulative attritional effect. Appointments for major treatments are cancelled at the last minute or sometimes when I'm awaiting a major operation I get phoned up at the last minute and asked to come in at very short notice. An example was my biopsy which involved removal of a lymph node from my groin - after waiting for two weeks I was phoned up at 5:20 pm on the Wednesday and asked if I could come in the next day at 8:00am, after getting prepared for the operation I was then informed they'd have to cancel as my procedure required a general anaesthetic (I'd been previously advised that a local was necessary and had eaten breakfast that morning). I was booked in for eight days later, prepared myself for a general anaesthetic - something I have a mild phobia about - only to be told by the new surgical team that this operation is nearly always done as a local procedure. Eventually I had the operation done under a local. That's very much what St Thomas's is like - the left hand doesn't seem to know what the right is doing.
The major problem with the hospital is waiting time - you can routinely expect a 2 - 2.5 hour wait even after you have arrived to your "appointment" on time or slightly early. That happened when I got my first full diagnosis - can you imagine waiting in a grotty NHS corridor for two and a half hours with nothing to read but last month's copy of Heat, before being called into the doctor's office and being told that you have incurable cancer? I can't believe this is the best way to treat patients.
Posted by: David H at July 5, 2005 05:46 PM